the efficiency of their common schools was eventually crippled by the grant of autonomy to local districts and the arising of petty private and political interests, they had initiated this unique American product,--a public system for all, dependent upon local support and responsive to local wishes. [Sidenote: Effect of these conditions upon the Northwest Territory.] [Sidenote: The Ordinance of 1787, and its provisions for education.] This growth of a ‘common schools consciousness’ was destined, as the result of a great educational awakening, to increase rapidly during the second quarter of the nineteenth century in the Middle and Southern, as well as the New England, states. But before describing this development further, it is important to see the effect of the ideals of these three sections of the country when introduced into a new part of the United States by emigrants from the older commonwealths. The new domain referred to was those large tracts of unsettled territory, belonging, according to claims more or less overlapping, to six or seven of the original states, and finally (1781), in settlement of these disputes, ceded to the federal government, with the understanding that the territory should be ‘formed into distinct republican States.’ After much discussion and various acts of Congress for half a dozen years, the famous ‘Ordinance of 1787’ was passed for the government of this ‘Northwest Territory.’ An earlier act (1785) had divided the entire territory into townships, six miles square, after the New England system, and of the thirty-six sections into which each township was subdivided, section sixteen was reserved for the support of public schools. A special contract also started the practice of providing two townships for the establishment of a university in each state. These provisions were later extended to the vast territory purchased from France in 1803 and known as ‘Louisiana,’ and to all the other territory afterward annexed to the United States. [Sidenote: Hindrances to educational development.]